BOOK I.

It was very still in the small neglected chapel.
The noises of the farm came faintly through closed
doors—­voices shouting at the oxen in the
lower fields, the querulous bark of the old house-dog,
and Filomena’s angry calls to the little white-faced
foundling in the kitchen.

The February day was closing, and a ray of sunshine,
slanting through a slit in the chapel wall, brought
out the vision of a pale haloed head floating against
the dusky background of the chancel like a water-lily
on its leaf. The face was that of the saint of
Assisi—­a sunken ravaged countenance, lit
with an ecstasy of suffering that seemed not so much
to reflect the anguish of the Christ at whose feet
the saint knelt, as the mute pain of all poor down-trodden
folk on earth.

When the small Odo Valsecca—­the only frequenter
of the chapel—­had been taunted by the farmer’s
wife for being a beggar’s brat, or when his ears
were tingling from the heavy hand of the farmer’s
son, he found a melancholy kinship in that suffering
face; but since he had fighting blood in him too,
coming on the mother’s side of the rude Piedmontese
stock of the Marquesses di Donnaz, there were other
moods when he turned instead to the stout Saint George
in gold armour, just discernible through the grime
and dust of the opposite wall.

The chapel of Pontesordo was indeed as wonderful a
storybook as fate ever unrolled before the eyes of
a neglected and solitary child. For a hundred
years or more Pontesordo, a fortified manor of the
Dukes of Pianura, had been used as a farmhouse; and
the chapel was never opened save when, on Easter Sunday,
a priest came from the town to say mass. At other
times it stood abandoned, cobwebs curtaining the narrow
windows, farm tools leaning against the walls, and
the dust deep on the sea-gods and acanthus volutes
of the altar. The manor of Pontesordo was very
old. The country people said that the great warlock
Virgil, whose dwelling-place was at Mantua, had once
shut himself up for a year in the topmost chamber
of the keep, engaged in unholy researches; and another
legend related that Alda, wife of an early lord of
Pianura, had thrown herself from its battlements to
escape the pursuit of the terrible Ezzelino.
The chapel adjoined this keep, and Filomena, the farmer’s
wife, told Odo that it was even older than the tower
and that the walls had been painted by early martyrs
who had concealed themselves there from the persecutions
of the pagan emperors.